Insights

Cyber Essentials is a government-backed scheme to help organisations implement a cyber security baseline that protects them from the most common cyber attacks. In this article, we outline the benefits of getting a Cyber Essentials readiness assessment to support you on your journey to Cyber Essentials accreditation.

Why get Cyber Essentials?

Hopefully you know what Cyber Essentials is and the benefits of getting certified – if you’d like to find out more on this, we recommend reading our “Cyber Essentials overview and requirements” article.

By becoming Cyber Essentials (or Cyber Essentials Plus) certified, organisations protect themselves from 80% of common cyber-attacks. This is achieved by providing evidence that your organisation meets specific requirements against five technical controls – this is either via a self-assessment or an external review for Cyber Essentials Plus.

Why get a Readiness Assessment?

Before attaining Cyber Essentials, we recommend carrying out a Cyber Essentials Readiness Assessment. This is a report that goes through each of the technical controls and requirements and benchmarks your organisation – showing which areas you meet the requirements and more importantly, areas where you currently fall short. Where there are current gaps, a readiness report should outline how long each item will take and a quote for carrying out the remaining work. You can then use this report to get budget approval, or to carry out internally with a better view on time and resource requirements.

The main benefits of getting a readiness assessment are:

• Have a clear outline of what needs to be done – By starting with a readiness assessment, you gain a clear picture of what areas need attention, what exactly needs to be implemented and how long it will take – giving you a simple roadmap to take you from your current position to going into the certification with confidence. Each control theme is broken down, giving you a simple view of where there are any current gaps in your technical setup or business processes.
• Better budgeting and time management – By having a list of remediation actions with the amount of time or cost they take to implement you have a clear view of how much budget or effort is needed before meeting the requirements.
• Easier justification of work – Having a remediation quote with a clear outcome (attaining Cyber Essentials) makes it far easier to justify the work and gain board approval and sign-off.
• Framework for your security strategy – The output of the assessment can form the basis of an ongoing security roadmap and strategy. This can then be regularly reviewed and built upon to help continually improve your organisation’s security posture and reduce risk.

Using Microsoft?

We’ve outlined how you can attain Cyber Essentials by using Microsoft technologies in this article, as we find that most organisations are already using some form of Microsoft products, which makes them a logical and cost-effective choice.